[After making sure that nothing managed to crawl its way out of the hedgemaze and make it back to the garden to possibly threaten the living, Andrew is exhausted and still kind of a mess.
She's done what she could as the being she's become, she thinks, and then they are lured to the tree. And she... was supposed to look for the living, wasn't she, even as a stuffed capybara, but she was looking out for them here, not thinking that the twenty-four hours of trust and cooperation she afforded other human beings would ricochet back the way misplaced trust always does.
Is that how Sariel felt, too? Or was he too hurt and sad and gentle to ever feel anything beyond that, even, was he too trusting the way she thought she had learned never to be?
She feels like she is suffocating. The miasma and the headaches from the befouled hedge maze are gone, but she might as well be locked in a cold stone cell with no view of the sky or the stars. Andrew might as well be eight years old in the Room of Atonement. Maybe she'll go back to her house and get locked there forever, now. And it would really be forever - ]
Ah…? Ah-
[She hears that G'raha's dead before she sees it, but when she sees it, it really sinks in. Her chest feels like its drowning in its own blood again; the Blue Star is back, if only in how she feels. Immortality is a tricky thing to hand someone who had already buckled herself in for her own death. It's tricky to conceptualized for someone who's only had a few months outside of an empty shell or who's become a different person in those short weeks.]
Then what did I… do any of it for? [Her death. Her planned death. The poison. Bleeding Bella out on the floor of her stolen office. Her arrangement with Ish. Her arrangement with G'raha to take Herta's family where her father couldn't chase them down even if Andrew didn't die on her wedding day. Agreeing before she knew she was cursing herself to this kind of existence. Saying she would help the people who were still alive. Realizing that maybe, just maybe, this once, she understood what it meant to have a parent?
What did any of it matter?
... And she's going to get left alone again, isn't she? G'raha will come back, and he'll come back to someone else who has been ensnared in this unholy salvation. And everyone has something that's worth living forever for, but her happiness will melt away in decades, and who will care about a people that were already almost wiped away and reduced to nothing when forever is in the balance? And forever, for her now, when time might pass so differently between worlds, could mean being trampled on for eternity, chained to the violent men of a royal family and a dying bloodline who will use her and use her and trample upon a thing that cannot break.
normal day in the graveyard (cw suicidal and general death ideation and implied spousal abuse/sa)
She's done what she could as the being she's become, she thinks, and then they are lured to the tree. And she... was supposed to look for the living, wasn't she, even as a stuffed capybara, but she was looking out for them here, not thinking that the twenty-four hours of trust and cooperation she afforded other human beings would ricochet back the way misplaced trust always does.
Is that how Sariel felt, too? Or was he too hurt and sad and gentle to ever feel anything beyond that, even, was he too trusting the way she thought she had learned never to be?
She feels like she is suffocating. The miasma and the headaches from the befouled hedge maze are gone, but she might as well be locked in a cold stone cell with no view of the sky or the stars. Andrew might as well be eight years old in the Room of Atonement. Maybe she'll go back to her house and get locked there forever, now. And it would really be forever - ]
Ah…? Ah-
[She hears that G'raha's dead before she sees it, but when she sees it, it really sinks in. Her chest feels like its drowning in its own blood again; the Blue Star is back, if only in how she feels. Immortality is a tricky thing to hand someone who had already buckled herself in for her own death. It's tricky to conceptualized for someone who's only had a few months outside of an empty shell or who's become a different person in those short weeks.]
Then what did I… do any of it for? [Her death. Her planned death. The poison. Bleeding Bella out on the floor of her stolen office. Her arrangement with Ish. Her arrangement with G'raha to take Herta's family where her father couldn't chase them down even if Andrew didn't die on her wedding day. Agreeing before she knew she was cursing herself to this kind of existence. Saying she would help the people who were still alive. Realizing that maybe, just maybe, this once, she understood what it meant to have a parent?
What did any of it matter?
... And she's going to get left alone again, isn't she? G'raha will come back, and he'll come back to someone else who has been ensnared in this unholy salvation. And everyone has something that's worth living forever for, but her happiness will melt away in decades, and who will care about a people that were already almost wiped away and reduced to nothing when forever is in the balance? And forever, for her now, when time might pass so differently between worlds, could mean being trampled on for eternity, chained to the violent men of a royal family and a dying bloodline who will use her and use her and trample upon a thing that cannot break.
And Siffrin is laughing.]